Nowhere to go
By: Sigmund Stoler.
Publisher: Cornwall Books
Published: 1994
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 154
Description: The date on the newspaper in his living room was April 21, 1973. Twenty years ago. The Item Standard. His father swore by it. Whoever had put it down had been reading the sports page. The paper was folded to it. His father always read the sports news first. It was two-thirty in the morning. He was only half-awake. Perhaps. But awake or asleep - his father had died three days after that paper had been published! Was he slipping mentally?

Moss Wyman, a single, thirty-eight-year old caring superintendent of an institution for the mentally retarded, is thrust into one crisis after the other. His forty-one-year-old brother, Grady, suffers from Alzheimer's disease; Moss is Grady's only protector, his only true link to reality. His girlfriend, Shannon Miller, a beautiful, driven, and restless nurse, feels she is only second with Moss.

Thelma, his brother's companion, feels put upon, fights with Grady, and threatens to leave him - a situation that plunges Moss into further panic. One promise Moss had made to himself was that Grady would never be put in a nursing home. Yet, he is left to battle alone for his brother. Even his own mother could not - would not - help.

In his despair, he wonders if there are answers. If so, where? he questions. Then one magic day, the real world seemingly disappears, and in its place, through some unknown device, his dead father appears. Moss is thunderstruck! Is it possible? But he accepts it. And he learns the unreal can function in the real world. Grady becomes worse. Shannon becomes more independent. Then Grady attacks Thelma, and Moss's job at the institution haunts him as racism rears up.

How Moss deals with his troubles, copes with a ghost, loves and fights with Shannon - but most of all loves his brother Grady - is the basis of Nowhere to Go. This is a novel that should not be missed. It is about people loving, fighting, making decisions, and simply living. And in a heartrending climax that is all the more terrifying because of the decisions that come from the heart, Moss finally resolves the complex threads of his life.